Pompeii Couple Reunited in Marble Inscription

A married couple from Pompeii have been reunited with the recovery of a missing piece of a 2000-year-old marble puzzle made of several inscribed fragments.

Broken apart and buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., the pieces belonged to a tomb inscription.

They were unearthed in 1813 along the Via dei Sepolcri in Pompeii near a burial tomb known as "Tomb of the Marble Door."

Still under construction at the time of the eruption, the tomb featured a door made of a single piece of marble, but carved to resemble the sort of folding wooden doors typical in Pompeian houses.

Although unfinished, the tomb had already been used for a number of burials.

"Most likely, the inscription had been displayed in some temporary fashion to be later embedded in the face of the tomb once the structure was completed," Peter Kruschwitz and Virginia Campbell at the University of Reading wrote in the journal Tyche....